Oceangate Expeditions via Reuters
Director James Cameron, who shot the 1997 film Titanic, called the sinking of the Titan and its crew “a terrible irony” and compared it to the sinking of the Titanic itself in 1912.
“I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night and many people died as a result. And for a very similar tragedy where warnings went unheeded to take place at the same exact site … I think is just astonishing. It’s really quite surreal,” he said.
According to Cameron, back in 2018, members of the deep-sea diving community sent a letter warning developer OceanGate that it was “on its way to disaster.”
Cameron, who has made 33 of his own dives to the wreck of the Titanic, accused OceanGate of ruining 63 years of safe deep-sea research by refusing to certify his machine and disregarding safety protocols and expert warnings. In an interview with ABC, he noted that underwater research has been a “mature art” with no serious incidents since 1960, making it the “gold standard” for safety until now.
“One of the saddest aspects of this is how easily this disaster could have been prevented,” Cameron said in an interview with the BBC.
Cameron also expressed concern that the deaths of OceanGate’s CEO and four tourists could halt further deep-sea exploration.
The director himself had been friends for 25 years with one of the victims, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77. In addition to Nargeolet, the Titan underwater explosion killed OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, businessman Shanzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Sulaiman Dawood.
